Welcome to the Escape Blog

I have had a great time this week putting live a new website for Magic Mitre, partly because I persuaded the client to create some top tip videos.

Basically, the client sells a unique patented DIY product. This currently sells heavily in the UK and US but in different ways. IE. IN the UK, you can buy it online, in the US they sell via QVC.

There is also the issue of terms and translation - miter vs. mitre being the main difference but also coving & crown molding; skirting board & baseboard; dado rail & chair rail, etc.

This led to two sites - with clarified content for each market, using Webmaster tools to defined the location of the .com website. Google now knows the .com is for North America and the .co.uk is for the UK.

The structure also allows for scalability for future international growth (the French version should be up in the next few months).

The videos cost next to nothing to produce but they do what they need to on the Magic Mitre You Tube Channel. These also feed into the top tips section.

Why not check it out, whether your are English looking to cut mitre joints, or American looking to cut miter joints.

Relate is a national charity that works to promote healthy relationships. With regional offices, we have recently launched a new site for the joint office of Basingstoke & Aldershot Relate.

The site is a simple static site with a news feed from Wordpress.

I was looking for a mug manufacturer the other day, a manufacturer mind you, not a reseller, not a distributor. So I entered in my search criteria of “earthenware mug manufacturer” and up popped the list. The first one listed after the sponsored links was this useless site which quite amazingly does not contain a contact number, email address or form across the entire site.

What a waste of time.

We have just launched two new websites this week.

Talk Seminars is an update that uses our new CMS solution. This means that the admin team at Talk Forty Four can create their own events, add forms and update their news feeds from an easy to use control panel.

Use Your Noggin - Another redesigned, static website for marketing. The Blog is still being worked on (live next week) and we will be transferring this to Wordpress, SEO’d and social networked to the max.

Daryll just called me, very excited, to tell me they’ve had a new lead already on the first day.

In the modern world of web standards there is no room for the poor implementation of javascript that had swept the web during the days of ‘Ive got a dodgy copy of Dreamweaver, and now I am web designer’, which led to the increase of Dynamic HTML download sites that allowed web masters to copy and paste code into there websites to make text fade in and out and scroll (The best ones where always the big clocks following the mouse around. Superb! I am as guilty as the next programmer).

When it seemed every mickey mouse website was a mixture of animated gifs and random fading text that made you feel that you where on some kind of acid trip. Javascript then entered as Obi Wan would call it the “Dark Times” everything went back to being basic or to the overuse of bad Tweening in Flash.

Javascript has recently gone through some kind of resurgence of late with the emphasis being on “unobstrusive javascript”. What’s this? I hear you cry.

Well, if you were to think of a website as a cake (nicked this analogy from Gaz and Keith): The base of the cake would be your HTML. If you want it to taste nice then it needs to be made correctly using the right ingredients. This means semantic markup using tags that are relevant to the content i.e. using <UL> tags for lists and <DL> for definiton lists, headings in the right place and all that jazz.

When you have finished with your base and you’re happy all the ingredients are there, you can then begin to decorate the cake. Decorating the cake in this case would mean using CSS to apply styles, colours and the general design giving you something that not only tastes good but looks fantastic.

Now this in itself would be enough for 9/10 web programmers / designers. However, we could go really overboard and add a cherry. The cherry, as the title of this article would suggest, is Javascript.

Using the ingredients in place we can add the cherry to enhance the cake and make it look that little bit sexier. The beauty of adding the cherry at the end is if no one likes the cherry (i.e. if the visitor to your website has javascript turned off) then they can take it off and crack on with the rest of the cake.

There is nothing worse than taking the cherry off and finding the whole cake crumbles in to mush because the cake was reliant on the cherry holding it all together.

So in summary where am I going with this?

I am a stickler for web standards although alot of other people out there may not be and there is nothing worse than coming across a web site that relies on the end-user having Javascript or indeed Flash installed to view the content.

Javascript and Flash should be layered on top of the content of a web site to sex it up or to make the end user’s experience more enjoyable.

I have worked on a couple of web projects recently that have highlighted the need for web hosting to be configured correctly to maximise search engine optimization. So, I thought I would highlight some common issues that I have come across.

Geography

First and foremost, I would always suggest that your website is physically hosted in the country you are serving. The domain suffix (.com, .co.uk, etc.) is obviously relevant but the IP address of where your site emanates from (the physical web server) can also affect your position in the country related SERPs (search engine ranking pages).

I say this because search engines have more than one server. The sets of results someone gets will differ depending on the server they have ‘latched on to’ when they connect to the search engine address and this usually is based, in part, on where they are located.

With (especially) Google trying to increase it’s level of relevant (and local) search, it would make sense that they deliver geographically relevant results that can be derived by the closest physical websites. This is obviously not the major factor of search results, but we are looking to maximise opportunity here, and it can make a difference, especially across country borders.

Domain Settings

Another issue that has cropped up is one of top level domain addressing. Some hosting is default set to use the www. protocol (eg. www.the-escape.co.uk), whereas some hosting is preset (I have found this more with US based hosting) to the straight http:// default (eg. http://the-escape.co.uk).

Every web page on your web site is it’s own entity, so if you are linking, or have any external links, to a www. page on your website, but it is defaulting to an http:// page, there may be confusion, especially if you start to use sub domains as well. Conformity is key.

On the websites we create, we use Global Reference files and Parent Paths. This allows for flexibility when creating and/or moving web pages. This has thrown up issues in terms of these domain settings and also the growing authority of a web page.

If you imagine you have a link going to http://www.the-escape.co.uk, this could be seen as a different page to http://the-escape.co.uk. This can potentially spread any ‘link love’ or page rank you have across two seemingly different pages, even though they are the same page.

This also comes into play with how you link to your internal web pages. If you have links in your navigation, or anchor text, that go to actual web page files, ie. http://www.the-escape.co.uk.index.html this could be seen as different from http://www.the-escape.co.uk, again, diluting the link juice.

Error Pages

Another area that gets highlighted in Webmaster tools, an also hinders usability of your website, is a lack of error pages. These are set at the hosting level, although you also obviously need the physical web page in place.

The key one (an error 404 page) is the page that your visitor ends up at if a page they have typed in does not exist on your website. It’s like a back up page, the sign on your door that says you are closed, but also shows your opening hours, so to speak.

So, if you went to www.the-escape.co.uk/sjhdgasjhgd you would end up at www.the-escape.co.uk/_404.asp, our error page, which has an apology and a site map.

Hosting is a pain, but oh so important

Hosting is an integral part of your web presence and can damage your search engine profile if set incorrectly. I came across a website yesterday that although on a .co.uk domain, kept referring to the parent site at .com, which may be good for the .com site, but certainly not for the .co.uk, which is the one they wanted to push.

Web hosting requires specialist IT skills and there is the important cross-over into getting it right for SEO, a point which can sometimes not get enough priority placed upon it by your regular IT people (IMO).

Finding a hosting partner that can deliver the expertise is not easy - trying to get the personal touch. In my experience, many hosting companies profess to have all the knowledge, but I have never come across one that understands the SEO aspect of getting it right.

That said, there are people (and companies) out there that do… and if you are looking to be found through search, a well constructed hosting set-up could be a very important foundation block in achieving it.

Meet TypeNavigator: the world’s first interactive visual font search system. “Visual” means you needn’t know anything about what you’re looking for — all you need is that image in your head. This system is unique in that you can identify fonts by memory alone.

That’s the claim of Type Navigator.

Creative Handbook, the world’s leading directory of creative services, launched their new website  yesterday.

Interesting for me is, away from the content, is the use of a wider fixed width screen size… it’s happening more and more in web design.

One in four small businesses has concerns over whether they made the right choice when picking their web address and one in three believes they could bring in extra revenue by changing it to something else, reports New Business.

I’d have to agree. I come across some right stinkers. Although there are very few available names to go around, my personal pet hates are:

Bad TLD (top level domain) choice

To get the right name, many companies move into the massive grey void of the alternative domain choices (.uk.com, .eu, etc.) If you are in the UK, selling to the UK, you should be getting a .co.uk. A person will try and find you automatically trying .co.uk or .com.

You also have to think about the perception that your TLD gives off. For example, I discussed .biz with a group of people recently and the consensus was that it comes across as very Mickey Mouse.

Initials

Back in the early days people had the impression that your domain name had to be short so people could remember it. If you think about random letters, how many can you remember and get the letters in sequence. How about next week, or next month? Isn’t it easier to remember a longer but more memorable name? www.basingstokebusinessnews.co.uk. Another advantage of these domain names is the potential use of keywords in your name - good for SEO.

Hyphens

Tricky one this because there is good and bad use. We have “the-escape” and it does bother me sometimes because when I am telling people my address it sounds like this, “the escape dot co dot uk with a hyphen in, t-h-e-hyphen-escape-dot-co-dot-uk”.

Example of both hyphens and initials: www.m-a-m.co.uk

What To Do

Firstly, I wouldn’t rush into a decision, especially if you have an established domain.

Secondly I would look for variations of your company name and come up with a few options. escapeonline, escapedesign, escapeweb, etc.

Then, test them on people. Leave the names with them to mull over. One may become a grower.

Lastly, if you do change your domain to a new address, you must make sure the proper redirecting is in place so you may transfer your existing domain weight.

Final thought. It may be worth spending the money to buy a good domain name. It may cost a few thousand but it is an important asset. Sedo have lots of names for sale, I’ve just bought one myself.

People see what they want to see with blinkers on. It’s worth bearing that in mind when you are selling what you sell. Your criteria and theirs probably don’t match.

For instance, watch this video and count the number of times the team with white tee shirts CATCH the ball. (scroll down when you have your answer)

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Now, watch the video again without concentrating on anything, simply watch the video. Do you notice anything strange?